I feel completely differently. As soon as someone shows me a table that says
Human Surgeons Mortality Rate : 1% Computer Surgeon Mortality Rate : 0.5%
I'll be sold on the automated surgeon. And I think this will happen WAY before AGI is solved.
Human Surgeons Mortality Rate : 1% Computer Surgeon Mortality Rate : 0.5%
I'll be sold on the automated surgeon. And I think this will happen WAY before AGI is solved.
If the risk of falling victim to a bug/mistake by a software surgeon is lower than that of a human surgeon, then simple desire for self-preservation you should choose the software. To choose the human over the software, even when it's provably more dangerous is allowing a baseless prejudice to put you at higher risk. It's equivalent to being given the choice between two human surgeons of differing skill levels, and choosing the lesser skilled surgeon on the basis of their ethnicity.
Doctor enters the prescription into a networked computer. It goes to a robotic pill picker/packer that affixes the label with instrucitons. Outpatients pick up the medication at the desk on the way out. For inpatients it is sent to the nurses' station on the floor of their hospital room.
It's been a while since I've been to a hospital in the US. I just assumed they were already doing this.
[1] http://medicaltravelsite.com/blog/bumrungrad-utilitizing-med...
It is a big change from the traditional shift change in many hospital units, where nurses going off duty typically confer in a hallway or at the nursing station with the nurse coming on for the next shift, giving a rundown of their patients’ status and needs. In some cases nurses may simply write up a report in the medical record for the next shift to read.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-most-crucial-half-hour-at-a-...
The surgeon could put the surgery into the controlled situation that the algorithm understands, and make some over-arching decisions through a UI (for instance, he could say 'join this nerve on this side to this nerve on the other', which might be difficult for the algorithm to work out), and then the algorithm would accomplish that task, and return control back to the surgeon.
More simply, a program could prevent a human surgeon using a machine like a Da Vinci from touching a nerve, or define the limits of bone removal.
The latter example does already exist in clinical use:
That may never come. The best-performing machine learning algorithms work by optimising a measure of error. Experience says that while it's easy enough to take this error to something between 10% - 30%, it's excruciatingly difficult to push it any further down.
see, I'm with you WHEN that's the comparison for the particular surgeon who would be performing my procedure. Not the average of all surgeons vs the computer, since that stat is not necessarily applicable to my situation.
You might hope the be the special snowflake who gets the heroic surgeon, but I wouldn't bet on it. Unless you are medically interesting in some way, you're likely to just get the next schmoe on the rotation.